t is once again a great pleasure to address the attendees at this conference following the GATA Workshop I participated in this morning. I’d like to thank Bill Murphy for his kind introduction. As many of you may know, Bill and I have become great friends as the result of our mutual struggles in the gold and silver markets over the past 13 years. That struggle has simultaneously represented the most exhilarating and the most frustrating experience in my nearly 49 years in the investment business.

After acknowledging my longevity in the business, I’d love to say that I started when I was 12 years old but that unfortunately is not true. I’m just getting old, which, at least so far, beats the alternative.

The main subject I want to address today is the staggering debt situation throughout the industrialized world and the impact it will have on the value of paper money and by extension, gold and silver. However, before I get to that topic, I would like to make a few comments about the price action of gold and silver in the last four months of 2011, price action that incidentally set the stage for the explosive price rises we’ve seen in the first six weeks of this year.

Up until Labor Day last year, gold was enjoying an excellent year, rising by comfortably over 30 percent in price in eight months. This strong advance reflected the turmoil in Europe, the U.S. debt rating downgrade, excessive money creation worldwide, and widespread economic and financial deterioration generally. Ergo, gold was acting exactly as it should in these circumstances.

However, this also represented the worst nightmare for the powers that be, essentially revealing to the public that all was not well.

Thus, in response, the Western world governments, their central banks, and their bullion bank allies sprung into action. Gold plummeted nearly $300 in a month and silver dropped by a third despite not an iota of visible improvement in the world economic and financial backdrop. It was just the same tired old criminal drill that we have seen throughout the more than decade long powerful bull market in gold and silver. These muggings took place primarily in the paper markets of the LBMA and the COMEX while the regulators, most particularly the Commodity Futures Trading Commission here in the U.S., blissfully slept .